- by Owen Morton
Being back in Nottingham now, I have little to actually do with my time. Okay, there’s always working in the library, which takes up a bit of time, and there’s the ever-enticing idea of revising, but largely, I’m not having such a great time here as I tend to have at York. This is exacerbated by the unfortunate fact that York’s term seems to end about two weeks before everyone else’s does, so I’m stuck here for two weeks before any of my friends actually come back, so I can’t go out with anyone. Last week I got round this problem by virtue of the fact that my friend Seb in York has a friend called Claire at Nottingham uni who I get on with fairly well, so I got in touch with her and attached myself to her friendship group and spent the week being a total random. In this way, I went to a birthday party as a friend of a friend, and the following day to another one as a friend of a friend’s friend, which was certainly interesting, at any rate. But now Nottingham’s term has finished so I can’t even go out with them anymore.
The point I’m coming round to – rather slowly and irrelevantly – is that since Claire went home, I’ve done little except go shopping. And so it came to pass that I set myself the target of finding a shop in Nottingham that would sell the figures from the new He-Man series. I’ve found such a shop in York, but I thought I’d search around in Nottingham. Not with the intention of buying them, of course – not even I am that sad – but just for curiosity’s sake.
There are actually several places in Nottingham. Forbidden Planet in the Broadmarsh Centre had He-Man and Skeletor (or actually Spin-Blade He-Man and Smash-Blade Skeletor, if you want to give them their full titles), and Another World on that road between Market Square and Lower Parliament Street had a commemorative Buzz-Off figure. However, in Gamestation on Angel Row – the same road, incidentally, that my library is on – I discovered a real treasure trove. All six of the currently available figures were there, attractively priced at just £9.99 each.
Well, it was tempting to fill my arms with the full £59.94 worth of figures – Spin-Blade He-Man, Teela, Orko, Smash-Blade Skeletor, Tri-Klops and Trapjaw – and march up to the counter there and then and purchase the whole kit and caboodle. Sadly, sanity prevailed (I’d have loved to see my mum’s face if I’d have got home and informed her that I’d just spent nearly £60 on such an impressive collection of worthless junk), but I did spend a happy five minutes examining each figure to see what it said about it on the back.
And so it happens that I came to be reading the list of accessories that comes with Trapjaw. As any fool (and probably no one else) knows, Trapjaw is one of Skeletor’s henchmen, the one with the interesting ability to detach bits of his right arm and replace it with something else. This is how he was portrayed in the cartoon, at any rate. As I recall, the original action figure was incapable of this ability, though I did get mine second hand, so I may not have ever had the perfect article. Whatever the state of play regarding the original Trapjaw, the new one definitely did include the ability to screw various unpleasant articles into his right arm. These articles, as I recall, included a hook, something vaguely resembling a hammer, and a laser gun.
When, on the back of the pack, these accessories were listed, it saw fit to state the latter was “non-working”. I have to ask you, is anyone truly, truly stupid enough to believe that a little plastic novelty which one inserts into the arm of an action figure is really likely to emit laser beams capable of dismemberment and various other forms of unpleasantness? The answer, I think, is no, and if there is, then I would argue that they deserve to be disappointed when they buy the figure. It would teach them an important lesson.
I presume the company making the figure had to insert such a disclaimer to avoid being sued under the American equivalent of the Trades Description Act. It’s the same requirement that forced a company to write, on the box of a Superman costume, “Warning: costume does not enable user to fly”, in case some suitably imbecilic nitwit decided to leap out of a twenty third floor window, and his or her family then suing the company for millions.
I’m all for companies telling you the truth about the product you’re buying. I mean, the phrase, “May contain nut traces” is always useful, in that it can help avoid the death of someone with a nut allergy. It’s sensible to require that companies put things like that on their products. (It’s not strictly necessary when the product in question is, in fact, a packet of nuts, but there we go.) However, if some idiot decides that he’s going to go for a quick spin in his Superman costume starting with an impressive swoop out of the top floor of the nearest skyscraper, then it’s really not the company’s fault, is it? Even if they haven’t cautiously inserted the phrase, “Warning: costume does not enable user to fly” on the box. Likewise, if someone attempts to kill someone using the laser gun included with Trapjaw, and fails, then they’re really not going to be in a position to sue, are they? (Among other things, they’d have to admit to a charge of something like Intent To Cause Grievous Bodily Harm.) Moreover, since the Trapjaw figure is squarely aimed at children – as is, in most likelihood, the Superman costume – it strikes me that it would be substantially more irresponsible to include a working laser gun than it would be to omit a warning that the laser gun doesn’t work. I mean, there are definitely no children in this world who have the responsibility to wield a working laser gun, and probably no adults either, with the possible exception of myself.
Right. I know this article’s been short, and only peripherally connected to Trapjaw’s laser gun, but I’m bored, and I’m going to stop writing now.
Only four days till Heath the Rat’s Silly Page reaches its second birthday! Aren’t we all just so excited?